You ask
more than I can give."
Ratcliffe looked at her a moment with a troubled and careworn
face. His eyes seemed deep sunk in their dark circles, and his voice
was pathetic in its intensity. "Duty is duty, for you as well as for
me. I have a right to the help of all pure minds. You have no right
to refuse it. How can you reject your own responsibility and hold
me to mine?"
Almost as he spoke, he rose and took his departure, leaving her no
time to do more than murmur again her ineffectual protest. After
he was gone, Mrs.
Lee sat long, with her eyes fixed on the fire, reflecting upon what
he had said. Her mind was bewildered by the new suggestions
which Ratcliffe had thrown out. What woman of thirty, with
aspirations for the infinite, could resist an attack like this? What
woman with a soul could see before her the most powerful public
man of her time, appealing--with a face furrowed by anxieties, and
a voice vibrating with only half-suppressed affection--to her for
counsel and sympathy, without yielding some response? and what
woman could have helped bowing her head to that rebuke of her
over-confident judgment, coming as it did from one who in the
same breath appealed to that judgment as final? Ratcliffe, too, had
a curious instinct for human weaknesses. No magnetic needle was
ever truer than his finger when he touched the vulnerable spot in
an opponent's mind. Mrs. Lee was not to be reached by an appeal
to religious sentiment, to ambition, or to affection.
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